Homophobia in 1970s Spain

Four decades after Spain began its transition to democracy, homophobia is still thriving in some conservative parts of Spanish society. LGBT Spaniards have, of course, made great legal strides: Parliament decriminalized homosexuality in 1979, passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2005, and approved the Gender Identity Act in 2007. Even so, a great many Spaniards—especially ones who had strict religious upbringings during the forty-year dictatorship—still hold fast to prejudices and misconceptions that their collective unconscious cannot give up, which keeps them from adjusting to a new social reality. This 21st-century paradox is what led the author to publish his doctoral thesis about antigay prejudice, written in the 1970s, during Spain’s transition from the Franco regime to democracy. At the time, his “freethinking” thesis advisor at Complutense University of Madrid agreed to defend the thesis to the doctoral panel, but in 1980, he suddenly rejected it as “unconvincing”. Still, bad news is often good news in disguise: only a handful of scholars ever see a doctoral thesis, while a published book enjoys wide distribution and can make the unknown known to a wide audience.